Imaginary Friends

Chuck Schumer’s imaginary middle-class couple

Hunan Dynasty, a few blocks from the Capitol, is not generally considered to be one of Washington’s better Chinese restaurants, which is saying something, because, Chinese-food-wise, Washington is not New York, or, for that matter, Philadelphia. Even its devotees—for example, New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer—admit that the restaurant “always has the faint smell of disinfectant.” Nor does Hunan Dynasty draw a notably powerful crowd. One night last week, as Schumer sat down for dinner, the only other diners were a group of out-of-town electric-company executives and Representative Dennis Kucinich, of Ohio, who is running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. “I believe I’m going to win New Hampshire,” he said, adding, “The tofu here is very good.”

Schumer, on the other hand, is more of a Szechuan-shrimp, spicy-beef sort of federal legislator. “I love this restaurant,” he said, and meant it. Hunan Dynasty, he said, serves cheap, honest, middle-class food, and Schumer styles himself a cheap and honest member of the middle class. The middle class, in fact, has been the key to his success. Schumer, though less widely known than New York’s junior senator—whom he has dragged, on occasion, to Hunan Dynasty; she even hosted a party there for his new book, “Positively American”—has been more instrumental than Hillary Clinton in rejuvenating the Democratic Party. It is fair to say that only George W. Bush did more than Schumer to help the Democrats retake the Senate last year. As chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Schumer recruited such ostentatiously centrist candidates as Claire McCaskill, Jim Webb, Jon Tester, and Bob Casey, and he raised enormous amounts of cash to fund their campaigns.

Liberal élitism, he said, as he stirred Sweet ’N Low into his tea with a chopstick, alienates middle-income families from the Party. “Middle-class people don’t think everybody should have to drive a tiny little car to achieve improvement in global warming,” he said. Invoking opponents of expanding the tuition tax credit to the middle class, he went on, “If we listened to the New York Times editorial board, we’d have twenty-one votes in the Senate.”

Schumer says that he is accompanied everywhere he goes by two imaginary middle-class friends, who advise him on all manner of middle-class concerns. Their names, until recently, were Joe and Eileen O’Reilly. “For the book’s sake, we wanted them to be more national,” Schumer said, “so they became the Baileys.” The Baileys live in Massapequa, in Nassau County, a town that is invariably known on Long Island as “Matzoh-Pizza.” The Baileys are both forty-five years old: Joe works for an insurance company, Eileen is a part-time employee at a doctor’s office. They worry about terrorism, and about values, and they are patriots—“Joe takes off his cap and sings along with the national anthem before the occasional Islanders game,” Schumer wrote. He elaborated, “They’re not ideologues. They’re worried about property taxes. It’s the tax they hate. And that’s what Democrats don’t get.” He has also drafted the Baileys in defending the C.I.A.’s human-intelligence program: “Had Joe and Eileen been in the room after the hum-int screwup, they would not have indulged in the blame game, gutted the human-intelligence program, or weakened America.”

The Baileys, Schumer said, sometimes dine out—not often, because of the cost—and they like Chinese. Which raised the question: What would the Baileys eat, if they were here at Hunan Dynasty? “The more conventional stuff,” Schumer said, “but they’re with it.”

They’re with it?

“I mean, they’re not not with it.” Schumer looked at a plate of steamed chicken and vegetables, and said, “They wouldn’t order that. They would order kung pao chicken.”

It was suggested to Schumer that he is a little bit weird. He acknowledged this to be true. “They’re real for me,” he said. “I love the Baileys.”

As swing voters, Schumer said, “the Baileys were very anti-Hillary when she ran in 2000, but they voted for her in 2006.” He went on, “They like Rudy. It depends on how he plays it. If Rudy continues to adhere to the right-wing Republican line, just cutting taxes for the wealthy, he won’t get their vote.”

It turns out, Schumer said, as he ate an almond cookie, that there are some actual Baileys in Massapequa, and he once met a couple of them. Mrs. Bailey was a kind woman, “very nice, a nice lady,” but the actual Mr. Bailey was a Republican. Even worse, Schumer said, he had a goatee. “Joe Bailey would never have a goatee.” ♦